On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 02:41:50PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> No, perhaps you are right. But asking for a reasonable time to
> implement the changes in the social contract does not requires
> rescinding and restoring the social contract amendments; it could
> just be a statement of purpose, a working guide to the change,
> perhaps with a hard deadline. The foundation document stays
> unchanged.
Because this sort of concept affects the interpretation of the foundation
documents, I think the implementation should be handled as a change
(presumably, as an addition) to the foundation documents.
But it probably is a good idea to characterize:
[1] What we think is most important to accomplish,
[2] How we think that should be accomplished
before getting into the specifics of the language which implements
these ideas.
Personally, I think [1] is already largely answered in the social
contract. (Our priorities are...). The problem is that in any given
context one priority must take precendence over the other or we have
a dilemma. Unfortunately, to date, more energy has been more focussed
on generalizing these concepts than on deciding which is more relevant
to specific contexts.
Which leaves us with plenty of dilemmas, and not so much energy for
resolving them.
In my opinion, the needs of the free software community take precedence
in the context of adopting new packages, in the setting of release goals,
in our choices about infrastructure and philosophy, and of course in
the context of any development work we do.
In my opinion, the needs of our users take precedence in the context
of security fixes, in the context of support for packages and systems
we've released, and in the context of the quality of our work.
Moreover, any context where these two needs come in conflict should
be treated as a very serious issue. Where these two needs come in
conflict we have to choose between several bad (or at least not good)
choices while avoiding even worse choices.
And, judging by the amount of heat which has gone into these discussions,
I think that other people have similar (though presumably not identical)
views.
Anyways, I do think that the choices we make to resolve the current heated
issue deserve the same class of treatment as our foundation documents, if
only for some limited time (perhaps until the current problematic packages
have "suitable replacements", perhaps "until the next major release or
the nth point release where n = 6", perhaps some other criteria).
--
Raul